"Never waste your time on a treadmill again"-From a Boxflew commercial echoing the sentiments of many visitors to this site.

October 30, 2006

Mag's New Project

Because I love starting things that might never work out, I've started fiddling around Google's Custom Search Engine. I've often thought that specifically searching the blog-o-sphere would be a bit easier than sifting through all of Google's results, especially when I couldn't remember exactly where I saw an interesting entry.

So, I've set up a spiffy comics search engine. Right now, it's set to search only the sites I've listed (it was a quick list--nobody should be offended if he or she doesn't see results from his or her (wow, that's an awkward construction) site. Google has an option to only emphasize certain sites instead of restricting results to those sites, but I've disabled that for the time being. I do think the general search might ultimately be useful, but I leave that for later.

So, what do I need from you?

Sites to include. Don't be shy about including your own. And don't assume I've added anything other than what happened to be on my mind today. You can add sites by sending me your list (). Or you can go to the plain old Comics Search page and volunteer.

A name for the search engine. Preferably one that can be turned into its own site name.

Suggestions for new scotches to try. Seriously. I like scotch and I haven't tried anything new lately.

Alter Ego 24 (2003)

Dipping into my growing pile of TwoMorrows' fine magazine, Alter Ego (it may be the ginchiest comics magazine covering the golden age through the 1960’s, but it takes a loooong time to read an issue), I just finished issue 24 from 2003. To clarify for you smart alecs, I haven’t been trying to finish it since 2003.

Back in 2003, Alter Ego had two halves, requiring the reader to flip the book to the other side and start from the beginning upon reaching the halfway point of the magazine. Each half had its own theme. The two themes this time were the commercially popular X-Men and the equally, if not more so, interesting, but far more obscure, artist Mort Meskin.

Let’s start with Mort. Good name, Mort. Mort. Mort. Mort. Nobody names children Mortimer anymore. In the golden age comics had two Morts, Weisinger and Meskin. Weisinger, by numerous accounts, was a Class A jerk.

Meskin, on the other hand, seems to have been the classic emotionally troubled, yet immensely talented type. Best remembered by Alter Ego editor Roy Thomas as being a pioneer in moody drawings, Meskin’s Vigilante work (some of which got reprinted in the 1970’s) are accurately described as moody masterpieces.

But when I think of Meskin, my mind sees the guy who drew amazing super speed action in the Johnny Quick strip, a fair amount of which got reprinted in the 1970’s. I’d argue that Meskin’s Johnny Quick stories were the opposite in feel from the moody Vigilante – Johnny Quick had the most infectious smile you’ve ever seen on a super hero and reading a Meskin drawn Johnny Quick tale is the comics reading equivalent of a sunny day.

Meskin died in 1995 at the age of 78. Alter Ego’s examination of Meskin’s career and talent includes an eighteen page interview (by master interviewer Jim Amash) with Meskin’s two sons and three pages of gushing by Alex Toth, an emotion I don’t recall seeing from Toth in his numerous, brief contributions to Alter Ego. As usual, it’s a thorough, informative and interesting overview of a comics creator.

There’s also a six page, no punches pulled interview with golden age writer William Woolfolk who wrote, among other things, Captain Marvel, Blackhawk, and Superman. There’s an interesting point Woolfolk makes about never having been fully committed to comics writing when he did it and his surprise at how it has outlasted all his other writing efforts in other media. Comics fandom may be a relatively tiny piece of written pop culture, but it’s one with loyal followers and a sense of history and preservation of the past. Good for us.

On the flip side, there’s a heaping helping of articles on the X-Men from their inception through the 1970’s. Even though I know full well that Roy Thomas wrote many an original X-Man comic, it’s a little disconcerting to try and reconcile Roy Thomas. The guy who’s fanatically devoted to comics history with (WARNING: Generalization Alert!) the X-Men, a title whose readership these days is unlikely to give a hoot about anything that happened longer in the past than last Tuesday (I warned you a generalization was escaping from my keyboard – I believe the threat can be contained for the remainder of this entry).

It starts with the obligatory Stan Lee article in which he spends 3 pages largely telling us how he doesn’t remember why and what he did.

More useful is the 7 page feature by Roy Thomas on his tenure as the scripter which began with X-Men 20. Thomas’ memory is the diametric opposite of Stan’s, so there’s a lot of info for the curious.

For the sake of thoroughness, there are also quick interviews with Gary Friedrich and Arnold Drake, who were both briefly involved with the original series. To bridge the gap between the old and new X-Men, there’s a transcript of an X-Men talk from a 2000 convention with Jim Shooter, Dave Cockrum, Roy Thomas and Arnold Drake on the panel. Read it and see who out of that group considered the X-Men to be “mutant Blackhawks”. Interviews with Len Wein, Dave Cockrum and Chris Claremont follow to give the new X-Men their share of the discussion. Read it to find out which of those three wanted to make Nightmare Nightcrawler’s father (the idea was shot down because it would mean Nightcrawler was not a mutant). Given the amount of coverage the genesis of the new X-Men has gotten over the years, a lot of the material here has been covered elsewhere in the past, but it’s useful to see it confirmed directly by the sources and all in one magazine for easy reference.